Streamlining the grading process: How AssessTech leveraged Totara and BuildEmpire to increase efficiency in rail training

AssessTech is a technology and training company specialising in all aspects of competence management for the railway industry.

They supply Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to companies within the railway industry, providing them better visibility of their competence related data, which along with complementary training and consultancy, means they are better able to assess risk, manage incident and target spending accordingly.

The Challenge

AssessTech Trainers identified three challenges when it came to marking essay question types within the existing quiz marking workflow:

Where multiple attempts were made by a single user, it wasn’t possible to mark only the incorrect answers from the previous attempt.
Responses and feedback couldn’t be compared directly between the old and new attempts.
It was difficult to see all unmarked attempts in one centralised location that could be filtered by assigned Trainer, company, and course.

In addition, Trainers identified similar challenges when marking assignment activities (most notably items 2 and 3 of those raised above).

The above issues were compounded by the number of long form answers that are required to be marked per individual submission, per course. There are at least 25 questions to mark per quiz per course. AssessTech typically run 3 courses per week, each with a cohort of around 8 individuals. This amounts to roughly 30,000 quiz questions to be marked each year on the first submission alone.

As a result of the above challenges, marking became an arduous and lengthy task that required bespoke reporting to facilitate.

The Solution

Whilst the core Totara product could not be updated to implement solutions to the above challenges, Totara facilitated the project with their partner BuildEmpire by brokering a meeting between the two partners. Totara identified that the two companies could be a good fit and facilitated in this way.

The solutions implemented by BuildEmpire are captured within four separate plugins that cover the following functionality:

A bespoke ‘unmarked work report’ dashboard from which the Trainers can track all unmarked work (no matter the number of submissions, task, nor course) and link directly to the submission.

An assignment history workflow that displays the response and feedback from previous attempts side-by-side with the current attempt.
A quiz history workflow that allows the Trainer to pin previously incorrect responses and feedback to the page whilst marking the current attempt (to facilitate direct comparison).
A quiz helper workflow which has updated the marking workflow such that only responses found to be incorrect on the previous attempt are required to be marked within the current.

All development work was bespoke and created against a specification set by AssessTech.

“The new AssessBook plugins are intuitive and much more efficient. I really like the functionality around candidate quiz re-submissions. Previously we required two screens to compare the old and new submission but now we can pin the old question and only review the questions that are wrong. This saves a lot of time and effort!”

– Simon Grove, Learning & Development Consultant, AssessTech

Results

The key business objective identified by AssessTech was to maximise use of the Training Team’s time such that it could be optimised for course delivery and creation. A considerable amount of time was being diverted toward marking, and whilst this had been made as efficient as possible through process (by utilising reporting in particular), AssessTech felt that further advances could be made through changes to the marking workflow in AssessBook.

Following use of the four plugins developed by BuildEmpire, the AssessTech Training Team noted a 50% reduction in marking time. The team also reported that due to the efficiencies made in the marking experience, marking became less arduous, leaving Trainers more satisfied and engaged with the system. As a result of the reduction in time spent marking, this time can be reinvested in course delivery and creation.

“The new AssessBook update makes working as a Trainer much more efficient. We can now access and grade work and quizzes that were previously ungraded, quickly, and efficiently. Previously we had to look back through old reports which results in a lot of ‘back and forth’. This is much quicker, easier and saves a lot of time – it’s now taking me half the time to complete. Best of all, the information is all provided in real time. It is particularly useful if I am grading a candidate’s work collaboratively, with another trainer. I can see the candidate’s work on my own dashboard which means I don’t have to spend time searching for it!”

– David Brock, Learning & Development Consultant, AssessTech

A by-product of the increased time and investment spent on course delivery has been an increase in pass rates. Therefore, the experience has been improved for Trainers and candidates alike and has directly benefitted the success of the company.

Having made the connection with BuildEmpire and working through the development process end-to-end, AssessTech believe this to have added considerable value to the AssessBook offering provided. There is potential to expand on the core product through development in a way that wasn’t previously possible (the AssessTech development team is small and dedicated to the CMS product built in-house). This collaboration will provide further benefit to other customers utilising AssessBook and scope for improvements to the core product.

“The development process went very smoothly. BuildEmpire understood our requirements exactly and created the plugins to our specification. They are an excellent partner for AssessTech. This now provides a way for us to offer additional bespoke developments for customers using AssessBook.”

– Hannah Washer, Director, Product Management, AssessTech